[PC] Last Day of June

Last Day of June features clay-like little people with small bodies, large heads and empty eye-sockets for eyes. No words spoken throughout the entire games. You’ll only hear your characters’ grunts, screams, yells, exclaims and so on. The game doesn’t seem impressive, yet it is.

In the beginning, the main playable character Carl and his wife, June are sitting by the lake. They then get caught in unexpected rain and start driving home. On the way home, they get into an car crash June passes away and Carl ends up in wheelchair. The game then allows you to play as the other four characters in the village that end up impacting June’s life: the little boy, the woman who’s moving away, the mustache man with the gun and the old man with beard. And no, they don’t have names for those characters.

just chilling in my tree house bro

What happens next is very simple yet complicated. You will have opportunities to play each character in a certain order. Once you make a choice with one character, the choice will further impact your next character, and so on. For example, if the moving away lady uses a rope to tie up her suitcase, her suitcase won’t fall out of her car. But then, the little boy won’t be able to use the rope to tie his kite (yes, you need a rope to fly a damn kite in here). The kite flies away and the boy chases it into the street, then causes the car accident. If the lady doesn’t use the rope, her suitcase flies out of her car, causing the car accident. Either way, you can’t save June.

You do have chances to go back to previous characters and undo your previous choice. Then again, the choice will domino effect your ass when you continue. It’s not a choice that’s you cannot undo. You can always go back and fix it later. Carl and June, on the other hand, can’t drive three feet on the road without getting into a car crush. And all that you do in the game, is to avoid doing stupid things that triggers June’s death. 

It’s definitely not a difficult puzzle game. I never got stuck in this game and I get stuck in games a lot. It took me about three hours to complete it. Besides your main quest, you can also collect floating heads. Ya, literally floating heads. If it’s on PS or Xbox I’ll probably get an achievement for getting all of them. Now because it’s on PC so fuck me. Besides collecting those heads, you also need to constantly rewind your previous character’s mistake, and watch those intro and ending scenes over and over. That takes a long time out of your play time. I saw the car crash scene like about fifty times. There isn’t a way to skip any of it either.

The third act of the game is very different. You play as the old man. By then you probably thinking, what can the old man do that can prevent a seemly unrelated death? The answer ties to the ending which I will not spoil. However, I do need to say that it ties perfectly with the rest of the game. And the ending…oh wow, just wow, make sure you have your tissue boxes. I did not expect the ending at all. It’s probably not how most of us gamers envisioned it. There isn’t an alternative ending. Just the one. And it’s perfect. 💗

 

[PC] Broken Age

I saw someone playing this game on Twitch. I liked the art style of it and decided to give it a go for myself. It’s appears to be a very casual, point-and-click game and you can choose to play between a boy and a girl. It really no matter who you choose in the beginning, because you can simply change between characters whenever you wish.

The story unfolds as you progress with the game. Nothing is thrown at you in the beginning. Ya, I don’t like stuff being thrown at me. Anyhow, you’ll slowly find out that the girl is being sacrificed along with few other girls to a fly with no wings looking monster who’s being terrorizing everyone in exchange to the safety of her entire village. The boy lives on a space ship with his smothering and over-protective mother, dying to participate in anything dangerous. How do these two people connect? I thought to myself quite often during the first act of this game. I really didn’t know how there’ll be any connection of the sort. It took me awhile to find the answer to that question. And it simply amazed me when the two characters finally cross the path. I will not spoil anything as usual. But it definitely took me by surprise. Like damn, I didn’t see that coming. 

After the first act, there’s couple of more hours of gameplay for ACT 2 and 3, if you take your time or don’t really know what to do like how I was. I got stuck a few times and not sure where to go or who to talk to. The game doesn’t offer hints but the characters do give you small hints every now and then. Might just have to try/use/combine all the items in your inventory in order to figure it out. No matter what you do, your character can’t die. He/she might just call you an idiot in the game but it’s okay nobody else knows. Like, “Oh! I didn’t know I was supposed to throw that squirrel at the dog, so he can go chase after it and leave his bone behind so I can pick it up and use it as a back-scratcher”. Ya, this is not in THIS game, k. But you know what I’m talking about. Troubles you run into when playing a point-and-click leveled puzzle game. So I finally finished it. The ending was kind of weak for my taste. It sort of just ends. Doesn’t necessarily do justice to the awesomeness of the plot of this game. But that’s just my opinion. What do you think?